This has frustrated me a lot in recent times: people trying to claim that things have always been this way (the lying, the political polarization, the poor treatment of various marginalized groups, etc), and citing specific examples from the past...
...when the problem isn't that the whole idea of these is new, it's the scale. Without doing some kind of more comprehensive analysis on both the current and historical situations, you're not going to be able to prove it one way or another (so asking for proof that things are actually worse now is also just...totally impractical), but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
> [...] the poor treatment of various marginalized groups, etc.
> [...] but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.
Treatment of marginalized groups is worse now than in the past?
Could maybe be argued if you intend some time-span bound (e.g: "worse now than it has been within my lifetime"), but even still I think this thinking is falling into a couple of traps already pointed out in the article, like treating the truth as "there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction" and therefore that anyone who does not see it must be oblivious.
...when the problem isn't that the whole idea of these is new, it's the scale. Without doing some kind of more comprehensive analysis on both the current and historical situations, you're not going to be able to prove it one way or another (so asking for proof that things are actually worse now is also just...totally impractical), but if you're paying attention, and paid attention in the past, it's painfully clear that things are worse now.